How to Create an Award-Winning Campaign

Winning industry accolades is something almost every business seeks to achieve, but many are lost on where to start. There are a number of useful strategies to employ in the journey to becoming an award-winning business, but the most important factor to consider is the timing of your planning process. The best time to start thinking about the award-worthy elements of your campaign isn’t when you’re drafting your entry – it’s before you start work on your campaign.

Define Your Why

Start with a purpose, and make it central to your campaign. Will your campaign advance your industry in some way, make a difference for a philanthropic cause or support innovation in DEI? It’s important to think beyond the positive impact a campaign will have on your business and define how your work will contribute to the greater good. Awards programs don’t reward teams who “did their job”; they reward teams whose impact is bigger than themselves.

Campaigns that have created a tangible effect outside of their organization of origin are the ones that take the cake.

Write Everything Down

Keeping track of your work as you go is crucial. Don’t wait until you’re getting ready to submit an entry to map out the key components of your campaign; recording your process as it happens ensures the highest quality of detail and accuracy.

Most PR awards programs have a similar entry format which asks you to outline your starting point, strategy/tactics, execution and results. Your starting point should summarize what your campaign is seeking to change, improve or affect, and why. In the strategy/tactics section, you’ll be asked to provide an overview of your PR plan. Your execution outline should include the most notable steps you took to carry out your PR plan, and your results summary should lay out the measurable ways your campaign achieved success. Make it a point to track results data for your campaign – numbers speak louder than words!

Polish Your Presentation

At the conclusion of your campaign, you’ll most often need to consolidate all of your work into a concise summary along with compiling supporting materials. Choose a member of your team who is a strong writer with immaculate attention to detail to own this part of the process. How you present your results and what you choose to highlight are the most important factors to pay attention to at this step. Be sure to demonstrate how your campaign has not only impacted your business but other communities, groups or causes as well. Place data at the forefront of your presentation and make sure your summary encompasses all of the successes you want to highlight; often times supporting materials are only scanned.

Spread Your Submission

Enter as many awards contests as your time & resources allow! The more programs you submit your entry to, the more likely you are to get recognized for your hard work and contributions to your industry. Once you’ve perfected each of the steps outlined above, receiving the accolades your business deserves is just be a matter of placing your work in front of the right audience.


Ready to win company awards and recognition? Learn how business awards can be a part of a larger PR plan by reaching out to us at [email protected].

Selecting SEO Keywords to Optimize PR Content

Leveraging SEO in your PR strategy can immensely increase your business’s online visibility, making your offerings more accessible to both current and potential new customers alike. One of the easiest ways to maximize your PR efforts through SEO is to utilize keywords.

SEO keywords are phrases in your web content that cause your website to show up with a relative search term. By embedding keywords a potential customer is likely typing into their search engine in your web content, your business will be placed higher in search results. Ultimately, the point of using keywords is pretty similar to a key goal of PR: to create awareness of your business by getting your website placed in the top results of search engines, ultimately driving traffic to your website and increasing sales.

Even if you already have an SEO strategy in place, the best beginning practice for integrating keywords into PR efforts is to audit which keywords you are already ranking for. You can either use an SEO platform or manually search on Google to see what combination of phrases triggers your site to appear. This will give you an idea of what your business is already ranking for and can inform your strategy for increasing your rankings.

There are typically two categories of keywords you will want to include in your PR content: basic and long-tail.

Identifying your basic keywords 

Basic keywords are your tried and true terms that will rarely change. These are simple, one to two-word keywords that define your business and are directly related to your brand. They can include anything from your business name to a service you offer, your product, or your industry. 

To help define these keywords further, put yourself in the shoes of your customers. A good question to ask yourself is “If I was searching for a product or service similar to what my business offers, what would be the first thing I would google?”

It is important to note that these straightforward keywords can be more challenging to rank for because they tend to be associated with a higher search volume. For example, if you were to google “luggage”, an extensive array of results would appear as opposed to if you searched a long-tail, more concise keyword like “blue carry-on luggage”, which would produce significantly less relevant results.

Exploring long-tail keywords 

Long-tail keywords are a combination of three or more basic keywords. They can require a bit more specificity; however, long-tail keywords can offer great SEO value because they tend to have a lower search volume, making them easier to rank for.

Implementing these keywords in your PR approach is crucial to ensure that relevant and appropriate traffic is reaching your website.

When generating long-tail keywords, you can start with combinations of your basic keywords. For example, a long-tail keyword could include your company name + specific product + price. A good rule of thumb is to keep long-tail keywords between 3 to 8 terms to ensure reliability and accuracy. 

Integrating keywords into PR content

Once you have your list of targeted basic and long-tail keywords, this becomes your guidebook. With this, you can start brainstorming ways to integrate these keywords directly into your written content. Op-eds, sponsored posts, paid press releases, and blog posts are all opportunities to strategically include the keywords your business wants to rank for. 

Don’t forget to monitor and audit

Tracking the search volume of your keywords and monitoring their performance is an essential housekeeping task. This is especially important in PR because you want to confirm that your content and keywords are working cohesively to optimize impressions on your potential audience.

A simple audit can be done manually by searching the keywords you’ve selected to see if your site appears. Alternatively, specialized SEO tools and programs can be employed for more thorough analysis. If you end up restrategizing your target keywords, the good news is you will not need to scrap your initial list entirely. The fluidity of long-tail keywords allows them to be rearranged and reformulated, allowing you to adjust as needed. 

The Takeaway

Selecting the right SEO keywords and integrating them into your web content, along with monitoring these keywords for performance, is a simple and effective strategy to produce powerful results for increasing your business’s online presence. 


Need help creating a PR plan that works in tandem to maximize your business’s SEO potential? Reach out to us at [email protected]